The Cactus Club Killings (Joe Portugal)

by Walpow, Nathan

  Being a guy, I was more interested in what went on with Gina’s female lover. She would demand to know why men were so aroused by the thought of two women together. I could never think of anything to say other than, “It’s a big turn-on,” at which point she would ask how I would respond to the sight of two men together. I would mouth platitudes about how everyone had the right to whatever orientation they chose, then curl my nose and say that actually seeing two men together sounded icky.

  I smiled in the dark. “I still think it sounds icky.”

  “What’d you say?” It was Gina, standing in the doorway to my room, her slim form outlined by the light of the moon.

  “Nothing. What are you doing up?”

  “I had to pee. You?”

  “Couldn’t sleep. Casillas and all.”

  Her silhouette nodded. “Forget him for now. Get yourself some rest, baby.”

  She slipped off toward the bathroom, and I was asleep before she came back out.

  ON WEDNESDAY MORNING, WITH GINA STILL ASLEEP IN THE living room, I washed my six days’ growth of beard down the drain and left the house at six-thirty. My destination was West Covina, one of a patchwork of small cities to the east of Los Angeles. It’s along Interstate 10—which is the Santa Monica Freeway in my part of town but the San Bernardino out there—and out past the 605. The 605 has a name too, but no one can ever remember it.

  The whole commercial thing had gotten pretty routine. Every couple of months one of my auditions would work out and I’d find myself on a soundstage or in some rented house. The other actors would be obsessing about pictures and resumes and casting-director workshops, and I’d be daydreaming about pachypodiums. Acting was so important to some of my competition that occasionally I felt guilty for nonchalantly taking some of their jobs. But not often. Especially not when the residual checks came.

  I got off the freeway and followed the fluorescent-orange signs with OLSEN’S lettered in Magic Marker to an address on a residential street. Equipment trucks lined the block; a covey of crew clustered around the honey wagon. I found a spot half a block away, checked in, and went to my dressing room—a trailer segment—to await my makeup call. I ran into the woman who’d been cast as my wife, played the game where we tried to figure out where we knew each other from, finally realized she’d been in a visiting production at the Altair.

  I lay on my tiny bunk thinking about Brenda. My mind must have considered this a huge imposition; next thing I knew a knock on the door startled me awake. The assistant director poked her head in. “Rise and shine, sleepyhead.” It was a quarter to nine.

  I rose and shone, got made up, and went out to the backyard, where they were shooting. They were getting the kid scenes out of the way first so the dear little tykes wouldn’t get overtired and become pains in the ass. My “daughter” explained to my “son” how she felt safe playing in the yard now that Mom and Dad had stopped using those nasty chemical insecticides. “Son” replied that it was fun watching all the ladybugs. They shot the thing a dozen times, took a break, shot a half dozen more. Around eleven they had what they wanted, dismissed the kids, and moved on to my “wife” and me. They set us up by some rosebushes, where I, as the somewhat befuddled husband, held a pack of ladybugs up to my eye, while my wife, the clever one, told me how each one could eat eight gazillion times its weight in aphids. We rehearsed it twice, I developed just the proper look of amazement, and we shot the thing. We were such professionals that we got it right on the seventh take. I left for home at twelve-thirty.

  Gina’d left a note saying she had a couple of clients to see and would call me in the late afternoon. I considered a swing through the greenhouse to make up for the one I’d missed in the morning because of my early call. But that special connection I always felt on my early-morning jaunts was never there later in the day. Trips to the greenhouse in the afternoon were for practical purposes, watering and disposing of bugs and removing detritus.

  Such tasks seemed most unappealing at the moment, so instead of going out back I entered the Jungle with the itinerary Sam had given me. It said Brenda’s flight had been scheduled for five-twenty, Monday evening. She had a three-hour stopover in Paris, then on to Antananarivo, Madagascar’s capital. She would have spent a day there before leaving for the bush.

  I looked up. Maybe I could have saved her if I’d been more insistent. I’d offered to drive her to the airport, but she preferred the shuttle. It avoided those tearful good-bye scenes, she said. I pointed out we were several years beyond tearful good-byes. She laughed and said, “You never know.”

  Now I shook my head. “You never do, do you, Brenda?”

  The night before, Gina and I had talked about interrogating somebody. It was time to start. But with whom?

  Half an hour later I pulled in next to a decrepit lime-green Renault Le Car in the Kawamura Conservatory’s tiny parking lot. My spot was marked STAFF ONLY. I silently dared the Parking Gestapo to do something about it.

  The conservatory was in the northwest quadrant of the gargantuan UCLA campus, near Pauley Pavilion. A ramshackle wooden sign announced it was only open to the public on Saturdays and alternate Tuesdays. This was because they had no funding. The reason they had no funding, according to the late Professor Belinski, was pure unadulterated asininity on the part of the administration. Brenda’d been fond of pointing out how the football team always had all the money they wanted, even though they sucked a lot of the time. She never did get it about college football.

  I found the full-time staff of the conservatory, one Eugene Rand, in front of the entrance, digging up an aloe that had been infested with aloe mite. Not even a tub of Cygon will cure aloe mite.

  Rand was in his mid-thirties, a failed graduate student unable to find his place in the world, who’d migrated to the conservatory because he liked plants more than he did people, and who Brenda kept on staff because he would work cheap. He’d lost his hair early and blown large portions of his meager salary on unsuccessful grafts. Something to do with an allergy to his own skin. The result was a red blotch resembling a map of Argentina right above where his hairline would have been if he’d still had one. I knew all this because Brenda had told me, which made me wonder what kind of privileged information about me she’d shared with other people.

  Watery blue eyes studied me from beneath Rand’s mistreated pate. “Hello,” he said, tossing the uprooted aloe into a wheelbarrow. He was no more than five foot five, with skin dark from his hours in the sun. He wore a plain white T-shirt and a pair of threadbare denim shorts.

  I told him who I was. He got a funny look on his face. “The article in the paper. You’re the one who found her.”

  “Yes. I’m sorry for your loss.” A little trite, but serviceable. “I just came up here to see if there was anything I could do.”

  “Do? Do? Just look at this place. It’s falling to pieces. We have whiteflies and blackflies. I don’t have money for fertilizer. My tools are all broken. And now, with Dr. Belinski gone, who’s going to raise even the little bit we did get?” He nudged the wheelbarrow with his foot. “You see this? I bought it with my own money.”

  “I’ll bet that hurt,” I said.

  “What did that mean?”

  I smiled charmingly. “Just that universities aren’t known for their generosity with their staffs. I’ll bet you’re not paid half of what you’re worth. You could probably get a better job somewhere else. It’s only your love for the conservatory that keeps you here.”

  A weird expression crossed his face, somewhere between puppy dog and sex offender. “That’s right. Absolutely right.”

  I’d gotten on his good side, but now what? This interrogating business was harder than it looked. “Do you have any idea who might have wanted Dr. Belinski dead?”

  “I don’t think I want to go through this again.”

  “Again?”

  “Yes. That detective was here yesterday afternoon. What was his name? Carillo. Cabrillo.”

  “Casil
las,” I said. “I’m kind of working with him.”

  “Then you should get the information from him. I don’t want to talk about Dr. Belinski any more right now.”

  “You have no idea who might have wanted to kill her?”

  “No! She was a wonderful woman. Why would anyone want to do that?”

  “She could be nasty on occasion, couldn’t she? Was she ever that way to you?”

  “If she was ever unpleasant she had her reasons.”

  “The story goes that she stepped on a lot of toes, what with her pushing for tighter CITES enforcement.”

  “If toes were stepped on, they deserved to be.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m sure that’s true, but I hear they’re desperate people, these CITES flouters. Did she ever receive any threats?”

  “No. I’m sure Bren—Dr. Belinski would have told me if such a thing had happened. We were very close.”

  “How close?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Word on the street is that she got around.”

  Silence. Lack of understanding. Or refusal to understand.

  “That she had a lot of men friends. I was thinking maybe you were one of them.”

  “Never. I would never even think of such a thing. Dr. Belinski was a fine woman, whose social behavior was none of my business.”

  “Maybe,” I said, “one of her lovers did her in.”

  Eugene Rand stared at me. Then he remembered his wheelbarrow needed to be somewhere else. He picked up its handles and marched it off toward a metal shack.

  “Mr. Rand,” I said, “I didn’t mean to disturb you. I’d really like to catch Dr. Belinski’s killer. They found the death plant at my place, you know.”

  He stopped and put down the wheelbarrow. He seemed about to say something, but after a few seconds he hoisted the barrow again and disappeared into the shack.

  “‘Death plant’?” I said aloud. “What the hell kind of thing is that to say? And what was that about ‘CITES flouters’?”

  I hung around a few minutes, just in case the killer should show up to restock. He or she didn’t. I returned to the truck and got out of there just as the Parking Gestapo showed up.

  Some freeways are dependable. For instance, you can pretty much count on the northbound San Diego just above LAX being jammed from seven till seven on any weekday. But the Santa Monica’s capricious. It’ll give you smooth sailing at rush hour for several days in a row, then entrap you in some ludicrous jam at 1:00 P.M.

  So it was this afternoon. Just past the National—Overland exit, traffic squealed to a stop. All lanes were packed for as far ahead as I could see. When a minutes delay stretched into five, I got curious. So did the suit in the Infiniti to my left. He climbed out of his car and craned his neck off to the east, never losing a beat in his cell-phone conversation.

  “Get off the damned phone,” I told him. He didn’t hear me.

  I picked up my Earth Opera cartridge and considered whether to chance the player. What the hell. You could always get new copies of your eight-tracks. I shoved the tape in. They were just kicking off “The American Eagle Tragedy,” their very sixties allegory of LBJ and Vietnam.

  I slumped into the seat. The gods of traffic had dumped me there for a reason, I decided. I was to think about Brenda’s murder until I came up with something significant.

  But nothing useful percolated up from the recesses of my underused brain. I got thirsty. I dug around under my seat and came up with a bottle of Mango Madness Snapple with an inch of orange liquid remaining. Lord knew when I’d dumped it there. I dropped it on the passenger seat in case I got desperate. I glanced over at Infiniti Man. He was still yakking.

  Think, I told myself. What do you know?

  It had to be somebody involved with succulents. The chances of some transient or old boyfriend using a Euphorbia abdelkuri as a murder weapon? Next to nil. Add dumping the thing at my place and I lost the next to.

  But what if someone wanted me to believe exactly that? What if someone from another part of Brenda’s life had wanted to off her, had known about her involvement with succulent plants, and had learned just enough about them to be dangerous? And what if that person had it in for me and wanted to see me implicated? Was there such a person?

  There might be. Four years before, when I’d started dating Brenda, she was seeing a guy named Henry Farber. Another professor, English or history or some social-science thing. He’d lived on a boat down in Long Beach. Brenda had planned to dump him anyway, but when she started seeing me she accelerated the timetable.

  He came to my house one night and accused me of alienating her affections. I said I’d done no such thing, that they were alienated well before I came on the scene. He promised revenge. He was still there when Brenda happened to stop by. We had an ugly scene, with much wailing and gnashing of teeth. Brenda banished me to the greenhouse, and when she let me back in, Farber was gone, supposedly convinced I’d had nothing to do with her dumping him.

  But what if he hadn’t been? Or he had, but four years later, sick with regrets about a wasted life, he thought back to when things went wrong and pinpointed that moment at my house? He joined the Long Beach Cactus Club, borrowed a few volumes of the Euphorbia Journal, laid his nefarious plans. And one fine spring afternoon he ambushed her and stuck a plant both toxic and phallic down her throat, then left it at my place to make me the prime suspect.

  Given the obvious symbolism of the murder weapon, this new twist on the spurned-lover theory had a certain attractiveness. I’d have to look up Mr. Henry Farber.

  I needed to know more. I needed copies of the police reports. Oh, sure. I’d just march into the station. Find Casillas. Hey, Hector, I need to know what the coroner had to say. If you’d be so kind, could you run me off a copy? Thank you so very much. I really appreciate it.

  When at last I got home, I decided to call Lyle Tillis. He was as active as anybody in the succulent subculture. Maybe he could provide me with a clue. I dialed him at work, and we arranged to meet at his place in the Valley at six.

  I took a shower and walked naked into the backyard to air-dry. Gina thinks this practice is barbarous, but she’s just jealous because she doesn’t have a backyard. I stood in the sun, stretched my arms to my sides, enjoying the cooling effect of the water evaporating from my skin. The way things were arranged out back, a neighbor would really have to be trying if they wanted to see me. And why would they? I had nothing spectacular to show them.

  When I was dry I pulled the U-bolt from the greenhouse door latch, went in, and considered my euphorbias. I had forty or so, not counting the less sun-tolerant ones in the shade house, where Casillas had found the abdelkuri stub. Tall ones, round ones, leafy ones, bald ones. The genus is huge, two thousand species or so, with four hundred of them succulent. Everything from E. obesa, the “baseball plant,” to the virulent but widely grown E. tirucalli, known as the “pencil cactus” even though it isn’t one. Plus giant tree forms, semisucculents like the crown of thorns, and, as we succulent enthusiasts are so fond of pointing out, the poinsettia.

  As I’d told Casillas, it was all in the flowers. The true reproductive organs were always the same—a pistil and a few stamens, maybe some glands. Simple and elegant. What people thought of as the flowers were bracts, colorful leaves that had evolved to serve the same insect-attractant function as petals did on other plants. The gaudy red things on poinsettias were a prime example.

  I picked up one species after another. There had to be some clue. I just needed the proper stimulus to pry it out.

  I was standing there trying to divine what that stimulus might be when the golden polistes landed on my thigh.

  Or maybe it had been there awhile. I don’t know. I do know that I felt a tickling sensation, and when I looked down I found an inch-long yellow and black wasp exploring my leg three inches from my bare privates.

  MY ABSURD DREAD OF WASPS BEGAN THE SUMMER I WAS nine, at Camp Los-Tres-Arboles. A kid named Bobby J
ewell was crying his head off one day, and the next he was gone. I asked my friend Norman Gonzalez if he knew what happened. “A wasp got him,” he said.

  “What do you mean, jelly bean?”

  “A wasp can sting you ten times in the same place without dying. Each ones worse than the last one. If you’re really unlucky you could die.”

  Since Norman had developed a reputation of knowing all sorts of neat stuff about nature, I took him at his word. And so a week later, when I was walking a log that stretched across Tres Arboles Creek, and when something big and black began buzzing around my head, I screamed my little lungs out, lost my balance, and tumbled into the streambed.

  When I regained consciousness they showed me my bandaged temple in a mirror and told me the damage was from a rock. But I knew better. I knew a wasp had stung me. Only once, possibly twice. Enough to let me know that, given the chance, it would inject enough venom to kill me dead.

  That was the start of it. From then on—even though I quickly realized that Normans grasp of natural history was questionable at best—the mere mention of a wasp drove me into a frenzy More than once in my ensuing teenage years, I turned off some cute young thing by acting like a total maniac when we encountered one.

  I mellowed somewhat with age, and got to the point where a yellow jacket taking a bite of my hamburger merely induced partial hysterical paralysis. I never got stung. But deep down inside I knew someday I was going to be. Ten times in the same place. The wasp wouldn’t die. But I might.

  I did my dance. To the wasp’s credit, it didn’t sting me. Nor did it go anywhere.